[Web-SIG] Can't we all just get along? (was: Re: wsgiconfig design)

[Guido van Rossum]

On 7/8/07, Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com> wrote:
[quoting Ian Bicking]
> > I've tried to encourage people to use this, but they get stuck on the
> > word "paste", so there's not many other people who consume or produce
> > these entry points except for use with Paste or related packages
> > (Pylons, etc).  I'm not sure what to do about that, except perhaps to
> > reset people's opinions with this rewrite.
>
> Well, this touches a nerve with me.  I have a similar problem with
> people rejecting out of hand anything that happens to live in the
> zope or even the zc namespace.  Similarly, at PyCon, I try to always
> give at least talk that I think will be generally interesting to the
> Python community at large, yet many people tend to assume that these
> are Zope specific.  I think this behavior is extremely unhealthy for
> the Python community.  Paste deploy is the only effort I've seen to
> provided a much-needed glue layer for WSGI.  It doesn't matter one
> bit to me what it's called.  It tries to fill a basic need.  Now I'm
> all for competition.  If someone really wanted to come up with
> something better, then I wouldn't mind seeing someone try, but
> nothing else is happening AFAICT.  I certainly have other things I
> want to work on.  Paste Deploy is a really good start and, FWIW, the
> Zope community is embracing it.

I don't understand why your talks are assumed to be uninteresting to
non-Zope-users (how much evidence do you have?), but I have a feeling
that the "branding" of generally useful functionality with a
particular framework's name is just bad politics. I agree that it's
unhealthy for that functionality to be ignored, but the solution is
not to complain about people's behavior (that's rarely going to change
the behavior being deplored) but to become sensitive to the problem
that the brand *apparently* causes and switch to a different brand.

Some brands have this problem more than others; I would expect that
Marc Andre Lemburg's MX brand doesn't suffer much because it's being
marketed as a loosely connected collection of various independently
usable subpackages. However the Zope brand is very strongly associated
with the web application framework of that name.  This is by design, I
assume -- check out the snippet for the first Google hit for "Zope".
Paste (despite its Google snippet) historically seems to fall in the
same category and it may be tough to undo this; moving the install
functionality to a separate brand name might be easier (as Ian
observed).

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)